Since the beginning of 2017, it was hard to miss the term dominating most news cycles and article posts – Echo Chambers. This ominous sounding term has been used to explain everything from the Trump presidential win to the Brexit referendum to the proliferation of fake news.

Simply put, echo chambers are self-reinforcing worlds that you create, populating them with people only after careful curation of their opinions, making sure that they support or are the same as your own. Echo chambers are a problem as they not only lead to incorrect predictions of political events, but can perpetuate xenophobic stereotypes, lead to further ostracism, and also have the potential to disrupt any democratic conversation between diverse people, something that is essential to the fabric of society.

While ‘Echo Chambers’ is something that might have only recently come into the limelight, this is a term well understood in academic circles for some time now.

Sociologists define the driving feature of Echo Chambers as “homophily” which is the inherent human tendency to associate with people similar to us.

This is true for ethnicity, gender, age, occupation, obviously geography (we all have that friend who went to America and now we only hear of through Facebook updates), and a range of other dimensions.

Along with our tendency to associate with people similar to us, we also seem to have a magnetic pull towards information that confirms something we already know – often known as the confirmation bias. This bias is so integral to us that even when confronted with evidence to the contrary, we tend to dismiss it and further harden our stance. Homophily and the confirmation bias combine to make a nearly impenetrable echo chamber, furthering the gap between diverse people.

Echo Chambers are in no way a new construct, but rather they are the product of how our innate tendencies interact with modern technologies such as the Internet and social media. With the Internet becoming a major - if not the only - source of information, more and more people are ingesting only the information that they want to hear.

The idyllic vision of the internet as a new global world order bringing people together is being fast replaced by one of an archipelagic collection of digitally isolated islands. As your experiences on the internet get further personalised, the further apart these islands drift. Facebook and Google feeds, and search results are personalised based on past clicks and ‘likes’ behaviours, due to which we would rarely be exposed to views opposite from our own.

Such embedding in homogeneous clusters leads to the framing of a collective narrative that is biased towards self-confirmation and hostile to any opposition.

So what do you so about this? We can recognise that an independent truth-seeking media is a public good worth supporting. We can support alternate funding models, such as pay-per-article, to ensure autonomy and high standards of journalism. We can call into question the dissemination source of the news which we support (PSA - Whatsapp forwards are not a legitimate source of information).

Most importantly, exposing ourselves to alternate viewpoints, with the explicit intent of understanding our bias, is a good place to start.

This wouldn’t eliminate your Echo Chamber, but it would highlight the extent to which you are in one which could be a step to change.

Really, the simplest way of recognising that you are in an Echo Chamber is to ask yourself “Am I agreeing a 100 per cent with everything I see?”, if yes then you have your answer.

Recently, there has been a mushrooming in the creation of apps and websites targeting specifically this problem. Sites such as otherside.site, politecho.org and escapeyourbubble.com add extensions to your web browser/social media accounts and highlight to what extent you are in an Echo Chamber by analysing posts liked, shared, commented on by you and your friends or shows you what the social media site looks like from the perspective of someone else.

BuzzFeed came out with an “Outside Your Bubble” feature on some of their widely viewed articles, which would pool in what people are saying about the piece from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. in order to give “audience(s) a glimpse at what's happening outside their own social media spaces.”

These extensions and apps, though, are created to pop the filter bubbles of Western news consumers, especially those in the US.

This isn’t because echo chambers don’t exist in India, but it’s because the existence and potential dangers of these bubbles haven’t been brought into the limelight here.

The Indian media is often under attack for biased reporting, and it is quite easy to see political leanings of the newspapers and media outlets by observing the news they focus on.

The Hoot, a South Asian media watchdog, conducted an analysis and found that individuals with strong political leanings and political parties own large sections of the press.

The Business Standard reported that more than a third of news channels in India are owned by politicians and their affiliates and are used as a propaganda vehicle to influence local elections.

This doesn’t even take into account informal mediums of news dissemination such as Whatsapp forwards which are gaining a disturbing amount of credence. When Echo Chambers come so custom built for you, it is hard not to get comfortable in one. It is becoming increasingly easy in India to pick and choose the kind of news that you like.

There is a pressing need for informed, democratic talks in India; ones which could only be had once we address the issues of our Echo Chambers.

Let us not wait for a startling wake-up call such as a Brexit to do something about this.

Aneree Parekh

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